Oct 20

Written by:
Thursday, October 20, 2011 4:27:36 PM 

I really enjoy all the discussion about Royal TS V2. I feel we are on track and the feedback is really, really good. Thanks to all who are participating in the Beta forums and everyone who sent emails and error reports.

Although I wasn’t in the office this week (stayed a few days in Tyrol enjoying the mountains and preparing for an MVP event in Munich this weekend), I was able to fix many many bugs and I was also able to implement suggestions, improvements and some feature requests.

Download and Installation

As in my previous installments, download and installation instructions are available here.
If you just joined the V2 beta testing party, I strongly recommend to explore our blog to find out what changed and how the new version works.

Startup Performance

The resulting assembly got a bit smaller. When you use ngen (from the .NET framework) you can improve the application’s startup performance. To do so, open a command prompt, change to the directory %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319 (on 32-bit systems %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319), then type “ngen install <full path to RTS2App.exe>”. After you typed “ngen install ” you can also drag the RTS2App.exe from the explorer to the command window.

This will precompile Royal TS and it may also take a while. After the command is finished, startup should be much faster. When Royal TS V2 will be released with an installer, pre-compilation will be automatically done by the installer.

Mouse Events

In Royal TS 1.x, double-clicking an inactive connection executed the connect command. We got feedback from users who wanted us to implement double-click actions for active connections as well. So we implemented a default double-click action for active connections: disconnect. Some other users reported this might be confusing and rather prefer to do nothing (as it was in the previous versions). After a quick poll on our facebook site, we realized, there’s only one solution:

I think the above is self explanatory

Use Multiple Monitors

An often requested feature (although I couldn’t really understand the desire to have that in Royal TS) was taking advantage of multiple monitors. Very similar to the /multimon switch from mstsc.exe.

RDP connections (only) have a check box “Use Multiple Monitors in Full Screen Mode”. You might wonder, why this checkbox is always visible, even in embedded mode. Simple answer: if you primarily work with embedded sessions but you want to use all your monitors occasionally, you check the option and when you use the “Change” or “Connect with Option” command with “Smart Reconnect” you can seamlessly switch between embedded and multimon mode back and forth.

Connect/Disconnect all in Folder

If you right-click a folder/document, you will see a slightly different context menu:

Connections in the folder are all connected/disconnected. Note: connections in subfolders are ignored.

Single Instance Mode

Another very popular request: make Royal TS a single-instance app. What does that mean? A single-instance app can only be started once. If it’s already running no other instance can be opened. Since Royal TS V2 is able to handle multiple files in one instance we thought that this makes actually sense and implemented it right away. If you try to open another instance of Royal TS, the already running instance “is asked” to appear instead of opening a new instance. If you do not want this behavior, you can disable the SingleInstanceMode in the RTS2App.exe.config file (which is now included in the .zip file). Btw, the RTS2App.exe.config file is not necessary to run Royal TS with all the default values.

Happy testing and looking forward to your feedback.

cheers!